


Balance in All Things

by An_Original_Retelling



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Tragedy, Clone Wars, F/M, Fluff and Smut, Forbidden Love, Gen, Mystery, Other, Plot Twists, Prophecy, Slow Burn, Slow Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-03
Updated: 2019-12-04
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:07:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21667933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/An_Original_Retelling/pseuds/An_Original_Retelling
Summary: A re-imagining of the Prequel Trilogy, with plot influenced by the Trilogy, books set before|during|immediately after the Clone Wars, and the TV show.What is a Prophecy, if not a rule meant to be broken - on a cosmic scale?
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi/Original Female Character(s), Padmé Amidala/Anakin Skywalker, Qui-Gon Jinn & Obi-Wan Kenobi
Comments: 6
Kudos: 8





	1. Earth, Present Day

“Satu,” Her name was distant, barely audible as she was hunched over digging and dusting the excavation site. She would lean in close, carefully dusting the exposed femur of a skeleton, wondering to herself who they might have been.

“Satu?” She remained barely aware of her name being called out for she was wholly engrossed in her find. A junior in her field, it was her very first opportunity to work an excavation and she was determined to get even the smallest step in procedure right.

“Satu! For the love of God, pay attention!” Her superior chided her with a hearty laugh as she was snapped from her reverie. She leaned back from the bone she was lovingly, carefully exposing from its burial and sat back onto her heels.

“I’m sorry, Sir. This is my first skeletal find and I must’ve lost myself in the excitement!”

Her advisor shrugged with a resigned yet understanding look upon his face, before it melted into another grin. He knelt down beside her and gestured carefully in the direction he believed the upper part of the body would be laying, based on the placement of the bone exposed. “Work slowly, carefully, and in this direction -” he gestured west. “If you take your time and occasionally loosen the earth around it in-between dusting, you’ll get there a little quicker. Just make certain you are mindful of your trowel, you don’t want to damage the specimen.”

Satu considered Dr. Pruitt for a long moment, providing him with a nod of understanding, committed to doing her best job.

“I’ll try my best, sir. I apologize for how lost I was in the moment!” She grinned while using the back of a dirt stained hand to push her red hair out of her face.

Dr. Pruitt placed a hand on her shoulder and gave her a gentle squeeze in camaraderie. He still recalled his fist discovery of human remains and he understood the allure of a mystery unfolding before your very eyes. He was only glad she was so taken with her work. With one more smile he stood up to leave and to check in with his colleagues.

Satu’s attention returned fully to the unmarked grave before her. She had been working for two whole days now, and here on day three the most she had discovered was bone and fragments of tattered linen, which she decided must have been waxed for it had not fully decayed. There was also a small scrap of leather, thick and clearly once tooled into a part of a larger whole. She had carefully set these aside in a fresh linen wrapping and secured them in small containers for later examination and preservation at the lab.

She sighed heavily, filling her lungs to the brim, holding it a moment, then feeling the tension in her shoulders and chest release as she exhaled. What she was hesitant to tell her superior, for fear he’d write her off as a young woman with a case of the fancies, was that she’d felt _pulled_ to this spot. Where normally, an archaeologist had reasons to pick a place to begin excavating - markers that might show where once a building or a grave might have been - this particular spot had nothing, other than an overbearing sense of intuition drawing her to it. It was as if it had its own gravity. She wouldn’t be able to explain this to anyone if she tried, for the urge to work this particular spot bordered on an intangible feeling, as if from a higher power.

Rolling her shoulders and reaching to the sky for a deep stretch, she allowed herself to quietly puzzle over how she could’ve known to dig here, and how _good_ it felt when she heeded her intuition - as though she were being rewarded for her perseverance somehow. So taken with her task was she that when some two hours more had passed, she was surprised to find the sun well to her right. “ _At least I’m digging to the west,”_ she laughed to herself, pausing to admire her work. By now, she’d exposed the femur up to the pelvis, and a bit of the iliac crest. This pleased her and she felt it was excellent progress for one day. She reminded herself to make a note of Dr. Pruitt’s tip in her journal when they returned to camp.

She stood and turned to begin placing the prepared two-by-fours to cover her site, and set them around the grave, estimating the length of it as she went. Then she grabbed the linen sheet from a table some feet behind her and returned to drape it over the skeleton. She shook the sheet out a foot or two away from the grave, an action that briefly blocked out the sun, and when it returned she noticed a glint from next to the remains. Interest piqued, she ran back to deposit the sheet on the table and retrieve her brush and trowel. Carefully, she began dusting and loosening the earth around where the sunlight bounced off something inanimate. Her first assumption was that it was a piece of metal, perhaps the hilt of a sword buried with a warrior. Maybe it was some sort of treasure interred with its noblewoman. She worked for ten minutes, cursing the rapidly retreating daylight and then her clumsiness when she heard and felt her trowel clink off the object. “ _It must be metal,”_ she convinced herself, not willing to believe she’d accidentally nicked a bone. She would never live that down.

After ten minutes of careful dusting and excavating, she felt the object come loose. Carefully, she reached down and retrieved it, placing it in the palm of her hand for closer examination. The setting sun caught the small rock just right and at first she felt disappointment at finding what appeared to be a simple piece of quartz. She glanced over the tips of her fingers back into the grave and for a moment swore she saw a hint of metal sticking up from the ground but it was quickly engulfed in the shadows that chased away the daylight. She sighed and made a mental note to check on that first thing in the morning.

She wrapped the rock in a strip of linen and carefully placed it in her shirt pocket, no time left to secure her digsite and also carefully pack out this relic. She hurried through covering the remains and spun to snatch up her pack before running after the rest of the crew. Dr. Pruitt congratulated her on a fruitful day’s work and cautioned her to get enough sleep, for he suspected she would be knee deep in it tomorrow. Satu smiled at this and excused herself swiftly to her tent. She would settle for a pre-packaged meal of jerky, bread, cheese and water if it meant more time studying the rock she’d procured.

When she was in her tent and had tied the flaps shut, she flipped the switch of the lantern so she could sit down on her cot and wile away the night puzzling over her find. There were occasional bites of food in between tense moments spent hunching over and squinting into the palm of her hand. She judged it to be no more than three inches long and half an inch wide. It seemed roughly hewn, perhaps by primitive tools or, less exciting, that it was naturally shaped this way. At the middle the rock tapered in towards the end, just barely, and it had many smooth faces to it, each only a few millimeters wide. She realized after some time that this was not quartz at all, at least not any she’d seen in her lifetime, but some unknown stone or ore. Perhaps a colleague would know and so she wrote a note in her journal there, with all her other observations on the object: “ _Inquire as to whether anyone has seen a stone such as this before.”_

Content with her observations for one night and utterly exhausted by her field work, she set the stone down on her bedside foldout, admiring the glow of the lamp through the stone as she lay down to stare blearily at it. For a long time she lay there, fighting against sleep and heavy eyelids. There, on the cusp of deep slumber she had a flash of a thought, almost as though someone were whispering to her. She felt a longing in her heart, akin to missing a lover when you’ve been apart for too long, and a growing desire to take the item back in her hands. She tossed and turned for some time, trying to drift to sleep but continuously being drawn awake by this growing urgency in her mind. The stone appeared there in her mind’s eye, floating in front of her as though suspended by its own gravity and she could rotate it on its axis with but a mere thought. This excited her and she spent some time exploring it mentally, reaching out with her hand to “touch” the stone. Eventually, after what could only have been hours like this, she succumbed to exhaustion.

When she woke the next morning to the sounds of busy feet around camp, the clinking of mugs and pots and pans, of low voices excited for another day’s work, she rolled over in hopes of catching the stone in the morning sun.

Panic.

“Where is it!” She nearly shrieked as she sat up with a start. It was there the night before! She flung back the covers of her bed and began frantically searching for it, turning over every object in her tent to no avail. It was though it had vanished. Adrenaline flooded her system then, setting her nerves on fire, her stomach to a roil, as she placed one hand around her throat and hugged her stomach with her other. She couldn’t believe this - the first notable find of the whole site and she’d lost it! She was sure this was the death of her nascent career and that drove her further into a panic.

 _Reach out and find me._ The voice filled her head then in the midst of her worries, and seemed to soothe her. She furrowed her brow, confused yet trusting. She closed her eyes and reached a hand out, feeling ridiculous and self aware as she did so. _Focus on me_ , _hold the image of me in your mind._

She held her hand out in front of her, eyes still closed, and concentrated. “This is ridiculous,” she whispered to herself. She recalled the image of the stone in her mind’s eye, imagined it how she had in her sleep the night before, and called to it with intention.

There was a response. A sort of _knowing_ , a presence of mind. An outside pressure that pressed against her body more firmly by the second. She couldn’t begin to fathom the sensations, how it felt like she was being squeezed and pulled, so she simply accepted. She felt the pressure rising, a tingling along her scalp, the mental image of the stone growing brighter, more clear as she concentrated on it. She called to it with her heart, allowing herself to feel for it, respond to it the way one does the touch of a lover. That sense of knowing, of understanding, of longing filled her as the pressure in her head grew stronger still. She felt a _thud_ as something small and cool smacked into her outstretched palm.

As quickly as it had all come, the pressure left her. The tingling in her scalp subsided and she slowly opened her eyes as her fingers curled around the stone. She turned her palm up and opened her hand to confirm what she’d just felt: there it sat, perched safe as it was the day before. She beamed with delight and stood staring into her palm for a few moments, tracing the index finger of her free hand over the body of the stone, almost petting it. She puzzled over the experience she’d just had, of how she seemed to have summoned the stone to her, and of the dream she had the night before.

“It wasn’t a dream,” came a voice, this time very much outside of her head and right in front of her. Satu jumped in her boots, reflexively clutching the stone in her fist and pressing it to her heart. She looked up and saw what one could only describe as a _ghost_ of a man, and thought surely she must still be dreaming. That or all of her time spent digging in the hot sun on minimal sleep in the middle of nowhere was getting to her. “ _I’m losing my mind,”_ she worried to herself, while staring down the apparition before her.

“I can assure you that your mind maintains its integrity, young one.” The man watched her calmly, smiling gently with his arms folded into the sleeves of some sort of hooded robe. He shimmered a soft bluish-white, and for a moment she understood, somehow, that this was the color of spirit. She wondered if God truly did exist.

“There’s not much time to explain, Satu, so I need you to listen to me carefully,” he continued, giving her a look that begged she pay attention and retain. Convinced this was all a dream, she simply nodded to the ghost and went along with it. Maybe she was lucid dreaming? Suddenly, she was brimming with excitement - she did love a good choose-your-own-adventure.

“In two day’s time, two travelers will land in a great ship, come to find you. It is imperative you meet with them, they will not know you by name though they will know you through the Force.” He stepped forward now, hands produced from the sleeves to pull his hood down and back from his head. His face thus exposed, she saw him to be a man of no more than forty, by her reckoning. He had closely cropped hair, much like a soldier would, and a decent five o’clock shadow. She couldn’t discern the color of his features, only the general scope of them.

Satu was enraptured by the scene playing out before her. She feared any further interaction on her part would simply dispel the illusion and wake her from this enthralling dream. She stood as still as she could, hardly daring to breathe, clutching the stone so tightly in her fist that it dug into her flesh. It was uncomfortable, visceral, and she wondered again whether this was _real_.

“When the two travelers arrive, you must meet them in a clearing in the forest just a few miles from here. Head due east when the sun sets and you will arrive there in time. They will be your friends and you can trust them.” As he assured her of this, she felt a calm fill her very soul. “Trust in that feeling in your heart and it will not lead you wrong.”

There was a sound from outside her tent and Satu jumped once more, head whipping around to the curtain of her tent. “Satu?” her colleague questioned. “Come and join the living, it’s time to get back to work!”

She turned back to see if the ghost was still there. He smiled to her and reached out to place his hands on her biceps. “I don’t have much time. Trust only that this is real, the travelers are your friends, and you are destined for a great journey.”

Satu swallowed a hard lump that was building in her throat and blinked back hot tears on her eyes. She couldn’t explain the desire to cry in this moment beyond a deep sense that everything she knew was about to change. She nodded slightly at his urgings.

“Keep the crystal safe,” he continued. “Do not let anyone else see, touch or know of it. Lie if you must, say that you lost it - your reputation here no longer matters. They must not find my crystal. I bequeath it now to you.” He tapped a finger to her tightly closed fist and smiled gently.

“And Satu? When you return to your work today, make sure you prioritize excavating my weapon hilt. You saw it last night after you discovered my crystal. Do not fear whether it will fall apart at your touch, I can assure you we build them to last.”

With that, the ghost released his hold upon her and began stepping backwards, fading as he passed through the wall of her tent.

“Wait!” Satu all but shouted, reaching her left hand out in gesture, to hold him there for just a moment longer.

“What is your name? Shouldn’t I have a name to give to the travelers, so they know who sent me?” She gave him a pleading look.

The ghost smiled at this and bowed his head to her as he returned the cowl of his cloak to obscure his features.

“I am Jedi Master Vuusen.” With that he gave her a comforting look and faded from existence.


	2. At the Brink of Discovery

Satu broke from her reverie as quickly as the ghost evaporated from her tent. In utter disbelief, she lowered her fist and opened her palm to discover the crystal was still there. She repositioned it then, balancing it on the pad of her thumb and holding it in place with her index finger. She studied it for a long moment, closing her eyes to retain everything she’d seen, heard, and felt. There with her eyes closed, processing all of the events from her strange dream to the encounter with the ghost, she felt a stirring in her soul. It was an echo of purpose; an understanding resounding through her very being. Every nerve fiber, every muscle and tendon, even the marrow in her bones seemed to hum with the purpose of it. Somehow she realized this felt familiar. Not just familiar but right, like a homecoming. She allowed herself to wallow in the sensation of it, afraid that letting it go she would never experience it again - and it was its own sort of euphoria that losing it would be unbearable. She felt a thrum in her chest, a soft pressure on her heart that filled her with another wave of calm and she opened her eyes. The crystal was still pinned between her two fingers held in front of her face, and she looked upon it one more time before wrapping it its linen cloth and securing it safely in a small pouch within her pack.

Assured that the crystal was safe and knowing she shouldn’t linger, she left her tent for a cup of coffee and to set about her work. She was sluggish, exhausted even, but knew she had stealthy work ahead of her and she needed her wits at the ready. She set her coffee down on the communal dining table and stretched her arms, back and legs before snatching a quick breakfast. She considered how she could go about exhuming the weapon hilt without anyone noticing. She knew where she would hide it, that much was already clear to her. Her pack had a false bottom that was currently storing a rain slick and so she resolved to wrap the hilt in it and abscond with it that way. Assuming it would fit in the first place.

She was grateful to find the rest of the crew preoccupied with their own excavations or artifact preservations and subsequent documentations. Casting a cursory glance around her as she uncovered the grave site, she resolved to work as swiftly as was possible before she was discovered. She didn’t want to have to answer questions about whatever it was she was about to find and she surely was not ready to have to steal the it after it had been locked away in secure storage. Something told her this would have otherwise been the find of the century and that knowledge left her stifling an upwelling of guilt. It was her life’s passion to become an archaeologist. To study, to discover, to help piece together the mystery that has always been man’s existence on Earth. There was a great part of her that did not want to forsake her scientific discovery, to betray her fellow man by obscuring knowledge gained through monumental finds. Yet when she considered doing what some part of her still considered the right thing, she felt a warning shock her nerves. Like brushing the shock wire of a livestock fence, it snapped through her system with a quick, almost painful reprimand. Furrowing her brow at this line of thought, she knelt before the remains and began to dig.

The ghost was right, she mused, as she gently dusted the metal sticking up from the dirt. There was something here and the more it became unearthed, the more her sense of urgency grew. She began glancing over her shoulder so much that at one point, when the hilt was half exhumed, she caught the attention of Dr. Pruitt. He raised a questioning brow at her before leaving his colleague’s side to investigate Satu’s paranoid demeanor.

“Worried you’ll harm that hand, are you?” He questioned her, glancing down at the phalanges resting half exposed in the dark soil.

“The hand?” She asked, dumbfounded, before looking down in a panic. Can he not see it? She wondered, staring down at what was very clearly some strange, futuristic metal object.

“Yes, the hand,” he chided, gesturing to it as he knelt down. Satu felt a nervous sweat prickle at the back of her neck and her heart began to hammer in her chest. He doesn’t see what you see. The voice in her mind was gentle and it sounded like Master Vuusen. Glancing from her professor, to the hilt and back again, she realized there was no way she could play off that they were beholding the same object if she kept the lead. So she yielded the discussion to him and sat back on her heels, playing dumb.  
“You’re right,” she confessed, feeling her heart slow and the sweat on her neck evaporate. “I’ve never dealt with so many small bones at once, I’m afraid of damaging or misplacing them.”

He chuckled at this and nodded his head. He reached down and touched a wrist bone that she couldn’t see, and gave her a soothing look. “It’s alright, Satu. Just take it slow. Here,” he said, standing up and stepping back for a moment to grab a medium sized tray. He rested it next to the hilt.

“Start with the finger tips and work your way down to the wrist bones. As you remove them from the earth, place them sequentially here on the tray. When you’re done, you’ll have a hand all sorted and nothing lost. Bring it to me when you’ve finished and we can document it together.”

Satu nodded silent compliance and smiled in feigned gratitude as he turned and walked. Staring after him for a long moment, she felt herself utterly confused as to how he could not have seen the cylindrical piece of metal sticking out of the ground at the skeleton’s hip. She shook her head and turned back to her work, puzzling now over how she was going to fake excavating a hand and putting it on a tray, while secretly she removed a weapon from the earth and snuck it back to her tent.

Leave the finer details to me. Came Master Vuusen’s voice once more and for a moment, she could feel the friendly weight of his hand on her shoulder, comforting her. She sat there for a moment staring at the work left before her, gathering her wits and fortitude to keep going. She felt a vague sense of danger tickling at the very edge of her awareness, almost like she was being watched. Work as fast as you can, I will make sure my hand makes it to where you promised it would be. Satu nodded internally at the order and set back to work. She picked up the pace, trying to keep the faith that with whatever was going on here, she would be shielded from prying eyes.

A few hours passed like this and every so often, when she would glance at the tray next to her, she would see it had filled with yet more parts of a human’s hand. Phalanges appeared, metatarsals pieced together all while she worked down the length of the hilt. As the sun grew heavy and low in the sky, she pulled the two feet of weapon from the ground. Exhausted, she sank down on her sit bones, relishing in straightening out her back and rolling her neck. She held it before her, two feet of metal, clearly damaged on one end but perfectly intact upon the other. She ran her hand over the length of it, tracing her fingers over grooves in the metal, rotating it to hold it up in the waning light so she could study it more closely. She wondered what she must look like to others - was she overly examining a plate of hand-bones? She knew she was sporting her most engrossed look, she could feel the weight of it in her furrowed brow, the tensing of her muscles at the corners of her mouth. She pursed her lips and rose up, dusting herself off. She glanced around for a moment, assuring herself she had no onlookers, and tucked the hilt neatly into the waistband of her trousers at the small of her back, covered the weapon with her shirt, then gathered the tray.

She put on a brave face, took a deep breath, and walked straight to her superior. “Here we are, one assembled hand.” She set the tray down gently on the table where he sat, pouring over documentations by lamp-light, his glasses perched precariously on the very tip of his nose.

“Yes, very good Satu. Thank you for your hard work,” he dismissed her with hardly a second glance. For a moment she was insulted. Granted she wasn’t the one who made the bones appear on the tray, she still played some part in it that ate up her entire day. Biting down on a sour remark, she gave him a polite nod and turned on her heel back towards her tent. She stopped along the way to gather a dinner tray from the dining tent, grabbing a hot cup of tea to compliment the stew and bread.

Weary from her long day of work, she stepped into her tent with a sigh of relief. Right away, she placed her dinner down on her bedside fold out, turned on her lantern to bathe her tent in cool light, and doubled back to tie the flaps of her tent shut for the night. Content that she had as much privacy as she could get at a communal camp site, she sat down on her cot and began to unceremoniously shovel her food in. As she ate she hardly spared a thought for any of her goings on. She was exhausted to her core and overwhelmed. After some time spent with her face in her hands, leaning forward with her elbows resting on her knees, she finally began to strip out of her clothes.

Once she was in her sleepwear, she brought out the hilt to examine it further. She couldn’t help the surge of adrenaline that flooded her veins as she held the object in her hands. It was clear this item was otherworldly - there was nothing like it even in their modern militaries, and certainly nothing like this in any sort of ancient manuscript or carving. She marveled over the craftsmanship, the weight and balance of it. Even damaged, she could sense it was still functional. Turning it over another time, she saw there was a sort of switch intact near the top half of the unblemished end of the hilt. Curious beyond reason, she bit down on her bottom lip in concentration and considered whether she should press down on the switch. She wondered what would happen if she did. She pressed her thumb to the switch, testing it without depressing it fully. It was clicky with a great deal of resistance, and something told her this was part of the design. She toyed with it a few more times before deciding to give it a go - she depressed the switch all the way, felt it click into place. There was a fleeting moment where the hilt quivered in her hand, grew warm to the touch and she could almost hear the crystal singing from across the room, where it remained tucked away in her bag.

It won’t work without the crystal inside of it, I’m afraid.

Satu looked up to see the self-proclaimed ‘Master Vuusen’ materialize before her.

He smiled at her as he removed the hood from his face and took a seat on the ground in front of her. He was that same ethereal blue as before and she realized she could see straight through him.

“What are you?” She asked him, curiosity getting the better of her as she clutched the hilt of what she suddenly realized was his weapon. With a flush of her cheeks, she set it down on the ground in-between them, feeling guilty for acting possessive over something that did not belong to her. He smiled appreciatively and reached forward to grasp the weapon. Her eyes grew large as he was able to take hold, lift and wield the weapon.

“I believe you referred to me as a ghost, yes?” He offered, as he twirled the weapon in his hands and practiced a few swings with it. He seemed pleased with how it held up. He cast a glance at her as he tossed the weapon up, then with a flick of his hand stalled it mid air. It hovered before her just as the crystal did in her dream and she eyed him wearily.

“I believe you referred to yourself as some … ‘Jedi Master’?” Her voice held a tone of suspicion.

“Yes, I was, once. A few thousand years ago by my reckoning.” He spun the hilt on its axis in the air, seeming to admire its craftsmanship, perhaps pondering his own continued existence.

“This was once my weapon. A double-bladed lightsaber, whose kyber crystal you now hide in your bag.”

Satu blanched at that and reflexively reached for her bag to produce the crystal in apology.

“No, no, I told you to keep it and I meant it. It will be important on your journey and will lend credence to your story when you meet with the council.” He gestured to the hilt with an open palm and caught it as it levitated back to him. He grinned down at his weapon and nodded, satisfied about something, before handing it to her. “This will help as well.”

With a quirked brow she accepted the weapon. She felt the weight of it in her hand with an appreciative bob of her arm before she produced her rain slick and carefully began to wrap up both the hilt and the crystal. Satisfied that both items were safe and secure, she tucked them back into the false bottom of her pack and zipped it up tight. With a pat to the bottom of it, she set it back down next to her cot and eyed the ghost before her.

“So just who is coming to meet me and what is the council? Am I in some sort of trouble?” Satu questioned him as she wrapped her arms around her legs and rested her chin on her knees which had pressed together. Her blue eyes were bright as she studied the man before her, and she felt that she may suffocate under the pressure of all the questions surging in her mind. Something told her there would be time for them yet, so she waited as patiently as she could.

Master Vuusen held her gaze quietly as he felt the Force flow around them both. He had waited a very long time to encounter someone on this planet aware enough to be able to make contact with him, let alone be able to connect with his crystal. He wondered who exactly sat as Grand Master and whether they would be open to Satu joining the Order so late in her life. It was clear she was in her early twenties, nineteen at the youngest, but for a Padawan that was far too old. It was rare that the order ever accepted teenaged or young adults as new Padawans - at best she might be sent to the Agricultural Corps, or perhaps gain a position in the archive. Whatever the reason the Force had called him back to his resting place, he trusted in it and did his best to set her on the right path. Even now, he could feel the living Master who reached through the Force and made contact with him, was helping guide him to this planet to find her.

“The council is a group of veteran Jedi, sitting as the governing head of the whole of the Jedi Order. Jedi - you can think of them like warriors - tap into the power of the Force to help maintain peace and prosperity in the galaxy. We’ve been known to participate in politics and war, when it’s called for.”

Satu narrowed her eyes at this. The force? “Do you mean to tell me the Milky Way is habitable beyond Earth, after all? We haven’t been looking for long, but we have been trying to make contact with any sort of extraterrestrial life.” She spoke in that plural we that referred to her planet as a whole. “And what is the Force?”

Master Vuusen nodded slowly in response to her question, not hesitating to correct where she was wrong. “Actually, I mean to tell you there are inhabited worlds in galaxies far away from this one. Upon one such world is the heart of the Order and with any luck, that’s where you’ll be going.” He laughed as her eyes began to bulge. “Before you panic, I’ll explain that the Force is that which you’ve tapped into all day. Speaking with me, summoning the crystal when you lost it - that’s the Force. It’s an all encompassing power that some on Earth call “God”. The council, and no doubt your future Master, will explain it all to you in great detail. First, we must get you packed and ready for tomorrow’s journey. You don’t have much time left here on this planet.”

Satu’s head was full to bursting with curiosity and anxiety. She started to wonder if there was some way to gauge whether one’s self was trapped in a coma. Surely she must be dreaming, how else could she explain this conversation she was having? The weapon she dug up or the crystal that she could hear softly chiming any time she thought of it? None of this was real. There aren’t aliens, there hasn’t been contact, and there most certainly isn’t extragalactic travel. Yet when she considered it, she realized nothing in her life had felt more real than when she called out to the misplaced crystal.

She then wondered how irresponsible it would be of her to just leave without saying goodbye to her friends or family. How long would it take for them to notice she was gone? A day, a week? The thought made her sick - she couldn’t just abandon everything she’d ever known and loved on a whim, could she? What kind of person would that make her? She began to pick at her trousers absentmindedly, worrying the thread in one spot until it began to fray and a small hole formed. A heavy sigh escaped her as she resumed the conversation.

“Something tells me I have no real choice in this,” she broke the silence with her worried tone. “I don’t even believe in a God!”

Master Vuusen gave her a measured look. “You have every choice, Satu. You can refuse to arrive at the rendezvous point tomorrow. You can remain here, continue to excavate my bones, study my weapon, perhaps even pick it apart. You could toss it in a river and pretend like all of this was a bad dream.”

Satu felt a pang of hope knowing the choice was still hers. She felt a slight smile tug at the corner of her mouth when the relief washed over her. Yet just as quickly as that relief found her, it was chased away by that same intuition of hers that pushed and pulled at her so violently she could not ignore it. She knew without knowing that her path was being laid out for her.

“Or?” She whispered.

“Or you can choose to go. Meet with the two Jedi who are as we speak on their way to find you, and you can head off on this next chapter of your life and see what the Force would have in store for you. Whether you choose to go or not, the Force will find another.”


End file.
